And Sometimes You Jump
by Anna S
Summary: If she lets it, this train crash might last forever.


Danny yells her name so often that it's almost white noise at this point. But at the third, indignant _Mindy_ she sighs and heads towards him. As she approaches the bathroom she can discern the faint, but distinctive smell of burnt plastic.

"Mindy, what is this?" he asks. He's holding her straightener by its cord with two fingers, gingerly, like it's a time bomb that could go off at any second.

"It's a hair straightener, Danny," she says, her hand immediately moving to her hip.

"What?"

"I think the name is pretty self-explanatory."

"It's like, three hundred degrees!"

"Four hundred," she mutters.

"…and it melted my toothpaste cap!"

"Okay, well, I'll give you two dollars to buy more CVS-brand toothpaste, Danny, I think you'll live."

"It's not about the toothpaste," he says heatedly.

"It seems like you're pretty mad about the toothpaste."

"Mindy, this is a fire hazard. It's been on all day. You could've burnt down the apartment."

"Calm down, fireman Dan, I think I know what I'm doing when it comes to hair tools."

Still glaring at her, Danny grabs one prong of the straightener in each hand and with a grunt of pain and a loud cracking noise, snaps it in half.

Mindy's jaw drops. She tries to say something, but all she can feel is anger, bubbling up in her chest like she's a teakettle about to go off.

"Are you serious?" she finally says, taking one step towards him. "Are you kidding me right now. Do you know how expensive those are?"

She takes another step forward, so her face is only inches from his and jabs her hand, hard, into his chest. Her eye wanders across the room, looking for something of his that she's strong enough to break.

And yet somehow, he's still acting as if he has the high ground. His mouth is set in a grim line, his arms crossed over his chest, his knuckles jammed into his biceps.

He looks so pissed. And so hot.

Mindy lunges forward, nearly pushing him into the shower, her mouth pressed against his, her hands fumbling with the buttons on his shirt. He catches them both and twists them around so her back is against the glass. The tiles are cold, but his skin is warm.

Danny slips his hand under her t-shirt and curses.

"I burnt my fingers," he says.

"Good," she replies, biting down on his ear lobe for emphasis.

She pulls back for a second and grabs a fistful of his shirt. "You're buying me a new one."

He threads his fingers through her hair, bringing her face closer, his nose brushing against hers. For a second she thinks maybe he's going to bite her back, which could be either really hot or really horrible, but he just kisses her, soft and fierce all at once.

* * *

><p>She never really stops being afraid that this fight, <em>this<em> will be the one that ends things. They are too similar and too different in all the wrong ways. Neither of them knows how to argue without going straight for the jugular.

And Danny is such a bundle of raw nerves. It reminds her of how she used to feel when she played Operation, trying to be careful, but knowing that inevitably, she was going to set the buzzer off. And frankly, she's not so great at being careful.

* * *

><p>She can barely remember how the fight started; something about how she washed his pan – which okay, how many ways can there even <em>be<em> to wash a pan – and then it was about the best way to handle a breached birth, and Danny's mother, and _everything_. Zero to sixty in three seconds, that's them.

She juts out her chest, and presses her hand into his hip, hoping he'll get distracted. But he's like a bloodhound on the scent of whatever they hunt, and now he's ranting about plastic in the dishwasher and she can't even pretend to listen.

Grabbing last night's merlot from the fridge, she pulls the stopper out with a loud pop.

"What are you doing?" he demands.

"Danny, if I'm going to be your human punching bag, I'm going to need a drink," she retorts.

"Nope," he says, pulling her glass back.

Her face twists in outrage. "Excuse me, I'm not a child. Give that back."

"Oh, you're really telling me you're not a child?" he goads, and something in her snaps.

She grabs the bottle and heads straight for the door. Halfway to the elevator, it occurs to her that going outside with an open bottle of wine is probably illegal, and she truly cannot afford any more brushes with the law, so it seems like her best option, really her only option, to chug it in the empty hallway.

Mindy eyes the door, hoping that he will emerge, but is shocked when he actually does.

He's wearing his gym clothing, his coat tucked under his arm. He makes a beeline for the elevator and she follows hot on his heels, while he refuses to make eye contact.

"Oh no you don't Daniel Castellano! Only one person can storm out, and it's going to be me," she snaps, pushing the elevator button for them both.

The size of the elevator makes it hard for him to successfully avoid her glare, so he stares straight up at the ceiling.

"I'm going to the gym," he says gruffly, as the doors open. "I'll be home late."

She takes another long swig of wine. "Well, I'll be home after that."

An hour or so later, she's in Connecticut, her head aching with the beginnings of a hangover, a dark red stain splashed down the front of her blouse. When Gwen sees her on the doorstep, she sighs and beckons her in.

After sharing the cliffs notes version of her evening and changing into borrowed pajamas, Mindy sips Riley's chocolate milk and waits for Gwen to finish tucking Riley into bed, as if she is Gwen's older, less responsible child. She pokes through the fridge, gazing enviously at all the foods in the shapes of dolphins and stars and Dora the explorer.

She hears Gwen's soft tread behind her and turns. Gwen raises her eyebrow at Mindy's choice of drink but then laughs and pours herself a glass.

"I'm getting too old to have this happen to me," Mindy says, letting out a long sigh.

"Oh sweetie, you never grow out of these kind of fights," Gwen replies.

"So, then how come you never show up in my kitchen at some weird hour of the night?"

Gwen shrugs, but appears to be considering her words carefully. "Carl and I still fight all the time. But at the end of the night you need to be able to put your kid to sleep and lie next to each other in the same bed. I guess, at some point, he became the only person I wanted to talk to about our fights."

Mindy nods. She noticed this development years ago; it's something she has always resented Carl for taking from her.

"It's just so weird, because when we were friends, fighting was what we did best. In fact, it was pretty much all we did. I don't know why it feels so different now."

"I guess the stakes are higher?" Gwen offers. She purses her lips and looks at her directly, squeezing her hand. "Mindy, I know how much you want this to work, and I truly like Danny, and I don't doubt the strength of either of your feelings, but I'm worried about you."

"I know, we kind of look like a train wreck," Mindy admits. "But I can't – I love him. I can't get off the train until it crashes. I need to know, for sure, what's going to happen. "

"Okay," says Gwen, clinking her glass against the pink plastic Disney princess cup that Riley had so carefully selected for Mindy. "Just, take care of yourself, all right?"

What she's too embarrassed to tell Gwen is that she's not sure which is worse: the fights or the cold front afterwards, when a suffocating silence settles over their apartment.

It's too easy for him to act like she can't hurt him. He can shut her out for days if he wants, in ways she's not capable of duplicating.

Usually she can thaw him with a dumb joke at his expense or a peek of one of his favorite sheer bras. But it's getting harder. Or she's getting less patient.

Either way, it feels like maybe it's Danny's turn to flash his bra. Or underwear. Whatever.

When she gets home from Gwen's the next morning, he's hunched at the island, drinking coffee. The picture of normalcy, except for the dark half-moons under his eyes and the bottle of wine, wrapped clumsily in a red ribbon, sitting next to his mug.

He jerks up in his chair when she opens the door. She sits down in the stool next to him without a word.

Danny lets out a little sigh, like he always does before he comes clean. When he speaks his voice is hoarse, as if it's been scraped raw.

"This might sound silly to you, I don't know, but I've always felt like, the way you treat your home matters. It's something you should take pride in."

Mindy can picture his childhood home perfectly: small but immaculate; each bed made with hospital corners; and a tiny Danny, striving to do his best to imitate his mother.

The image makes her stomach clench. But it doesn't change the fact that he shut down and shut her out yet again; that he's letting his father ruin yet another thing in his life.

"Danny, at some point, you are going to have to stop seeing everything I do as a reflection of how I feel about you," she pauses, trying to calm the quaver in her voice.

"The fact that I love you won't change who I am. There's literally no guy in the world, not even Michael Fassbender, who could get me to enjoy doing dishes."

"But I am trying," she adds.

"I know," he says. "I do see that. I really do."

"You need to try too," she says.

"You're right," he says, nodding. "And I know I can be a pain in the ass, but you can't run out on me. I don't – I don't handle it well."

"I'm sorry," she says. She knows how hard it is for him give her this almost-apology, what it costs him. But she's not sure it should be so hard.

He leans his head against her shoulder, like a small child looking for forgiveness. "I'm sorry, " she murmurs into his dark curls.

* * *

><p>So they were good at friendship and they're great at sex and she assumed that one plus one would equal two. But there must be some chemical reaction she doesn't understand, because one plus one equals something that isn't even a number.<p>

In the movies, there's always a hurdle: an ex-boyfriend, or a brother in a coma, or a misunderstanding that starts small and spirals into something much larger. But their greatest hurdle has always been each other.

* * *

><p>Peter christens Wednesdays office karaoke night and bullies everybody into showing up. For being such an idiot he really has a way with guilt trips.<p>

But it actually ends up being fun. Jeremy croons to Van Morrison, Peter sings Blurred Lines, which gross, and _of course_, and Morgan makes it his personal mission to get Danny drunk enough to sing Bon Jovi. She would put it at less than 50/50 odds, but she's saving the battery life of her iPhone just in case.

"I'm headed to the ladies room, no singing until I get back!" Mindy says.

"You can go too, Dr. C," says Morgan, nudging Mindy, giving Danny a grotesque wink. At a very high pitch, even for her, Mindy asks Danny to get them the next round and nearly knocks Morgan off his feet with a hip check.

Danny is staring at both of them, his eyes going back and forth from Morgan to Mindy, a frown spreading across his face.

The he grabs her arm, his fingers digging into her sleeve, and pulls her into a booth on the other side of the bar, while she complains loudly that he is damaging her new silk blouse.

"Please tell me that Morgan isn't talking about you-know-what," he says in a sandpapery whisper.

"He's not?"

"Mindy, I told you, you can't do this anymore."

"Yeah, you _told _me, but you know what, I get a say in this relationship too."

"Not when it comes to information that is private between you and me," he says gesturing fiercely between them.

"Why does it matter so much?" she asks, genuinely wishing she could understand. "They're our friends, they're rooting for us. They're not going to use that information to hurt you."

"Because," he says as his hands making stabbing motions in the air. "There are things, Mindy – things that are private between two people!"

"Oh, I see, now it's all so clear."

"Why isn't it enough that it matters to me?"

She takes a sharp, cleansing breath, like hitting a reset button. "I'm sorry," she says, "I promise I will try harder not to over share – but _you_ need to try and not let these things get to you so much."

"What things? My girlfriend not listening to me or my girlfriend thinking it's appropriate to share intimate details about our bedroom…activities with every tom, dick and harry?"

"Bathroom activities," she corrects him, over her better judgment, and his nose flares, the muscle in his jaw working furiously.

"I'm going home," he snaps. "By the way, you were right, that skirt isn't a flattering shape for you."

Her mouth makes a round O. "Excuse me, I'm not taking fashion advice from a man who buys his t-shirts in bulk from Cost-Co!"

He bites back whatever response he was going to make, and still glaring at her, pushes back from the table. Apparently, he doesn't have to choose between fight and flight.

"I'll see you at home," he says as he pulls on his coat, somehow even managing to do that in a self-righteous way.

She sits at the table, fuming. If she's going to have to be the patient, mature one in this relationship all the time, they're really in trouble.

She's contemplating slipping out when Jeremy finds her.

"Mindy! Where's Danny? Morgan bought a pitcher of that disgusting beer he likes."

Jeremy looks pleasantly drunk and his cheeks are bright red. For the first time in a long, long time, Mindy almost wishes he was something she still wanted.

She flutters her hands towards the door. "He left."

"Did you have a little tiff?" he asks.

"Nope…I think this qualifies as a big tiff."

Jeremy sinks down into the booth across from her. "Don't look so sad, buck up. It's Danny. That's what he does. But he's trying. He's came to a _karaoke_ bar for god's sake."

"Yeah," she says, still shaking her head. "I know."

* * *

><p>At some point it occurs to her that if they're going to end, it might have to be her that does the ending. If she lets it, this train wreck might last forever.<p>

And there are moments, where he turns to her and looks at her with such love, that she thinks, maybe that's enough of a forever for her.

Strangely, her internal cheerleader, the voice in her head telling her that _she deserves to be happier than this_ sounds a lot like Danny. She wishes so badly that she could travel in time to a pre-them era and get his particular brand of no-nonsense, occasionally incoherent advice.

She kind of suspects that he would tell her to cut her losses.

But of course, she didn't usually listen to him back then either.

* * *

><p>They get into another fight. A knock out, drag down, stop for a snack break, stop for a sex break, all night fight.<p>

They lob cliché after cliché. He calls her selfish. She calls him destructive and stubborn. He tells her that men leave her for a reason. She brings out the Christina-word. She will never understand why he can't just pay the extra twenty dollars a month for the premium cable channels. He doesn't know why she won't at least consider being a part-time stay at home mom.

At some point before the sun rises, he stops and shakes his head. "This isn't working."

Even though part of her knew that this was where this fight was headed, maybe she even picked this fight for that reason, she can immediately taste bile rising in her throat, feel the hot pinprick of tears behind her eyes. She tries to push it all back.

"You're right," she says. "I think maybe, we should take a step back."

His lips are pressed together and his eyebrow is raised, almost like she's impressed him.

"You mean that," he says, "this isn't just Tuesday Mindy talking, and Sunday Mindy will feel completely different?"

"I feel like insulting me probably isn't the best way to talk me out of this break-up."

"Who says I'm trying to talk my way out of it?" he says. "Maybe I was hoping you would pull the plug so I wouldn't have to be the one to do it this time."

His body is visibly humming with tension and he punctuates each word with a tiny jerk of his head. She's almost certain his words are just bravado, but that doesn't make them hurt any less.

"So, this is it," he says, his tone changing abruptly, his voice suddenly creaky and defeated.

What she wants to say is, _I loved you and I wanted you and we got the timing right and neither of us cheated or got addicted to drugs__ and look at us. _

Instead, she just stands there, frozen and panicked.

"I see," he says slowly. "Of course. We hit a rough patch, got a little a dose of reality, so you're out the door. Classic Mindy."

"Oh I'm sorry, I didn't mean to step on your turf," she spits at him. "Do you even know what I'm upset about?"

"Yes," he says, but he doesn't even sound like he believes it.

"Why?"

Because, we've been fighting…and I uh, broke your hair thing."

"No, Danny _you've_ been fighting, and I've been fighting for us. And I'm tired."

"Min, c'mon," he says, seeking her eyes and the amount of hurt in his voice gives her pause.

But he quickly takes a step back, his shoulders sagging. "Never mind," he says, "you're right. This was never going to work."

* * *

><p>Mindy loves hard. She's always admired that about herself. For the first time, though, she wishes she'd loved a little less hard. Or maybe a little harder.<p>

Because, this, this feels impossible.

She tries her usual motivational speeches: _You are strong. You are wonder woman with a less trashy outfit. You are Sandra Bullock post-Jesse James minus the whole adopted baby thing. _They get her through the mornings, through her commute, but then she's at the office, and he's there, and she's back at square one.

She bounces back and forth between not being able to believe that they couldn't make it work, and being shocked that they ever thought they could.

And it's worse than the last time. At least then, she could try to pretend it was meaningless, and she still had him, in some small way. Now, they've burned through their painstakingly constructed friendship, leaving them where they were years ago, without even the prickly curiosity.

In her manicurist's office, she finds herself reading travel magazines instead of US Weekly. She's not sure what it means exactly, except that she needs a change.

The idea of California starts to bloom inside her, and she thinks _warmth_ and _sun _and _away. _It fills her imagination, like New York did once upon a time, when she was sitting in her dorm room, envisioning a future through rom-com tinted lens. She starts watching Pretty Woman and Clueless on repeat.

It turns out that it's not hard to find a job there. California has lots of vaginas and there are only so many talented charming female doctors of color.

Jeremy and Peter take it relatively well. In retrospect, she thinks they probably saw this coming; maybe they're even a little relieved.

"Have you told Danny yet?" Peter asks.

"I was actually hoping – "

"Nope," he cuts her off. "A million worlds of no fucking way. In fact, I would like to be in a different zip code when that conversation happens."

But she decides that it's absolutely her turn to be a coward and she tells him along with the rest of the staff during their next office meeting. Danny stares at the floor and she can see him swallow, his Adam's apple bobbing. Slowly, he makes and unmakes a fist with his hand.

When the meeting ends, he hangs back so that they are the only ones left in the room.

Mindy feels strangely cold and removed from this moment and she wonders if this is what it feels like to be him all the time.

"So this is your brilliant solution," he says, in a voice laced with pain and anger and something else she can't identify or untangle; something for the next girlfriend to not be allowed to understand.

"You wanted space, Danny," she says, vaguely recalling that one of their last fights had involved her possessions consuming his entire closet, "so take the whole state. Have the whole coast."

"But I'm taking the waffle iron," she adds.

* * *

><p>On her last day, he finds her in the hot pipe room, filing away her office things in boxes marked things like <em>themed party décor <em>and _new business ideas for attracting VIP patients__._ All the things she can't justify taking with her but can't bring herself to throw away.

There's a box already tucked away marked _Danny_, filled with photos of them and the menu from his favorite deli that closed the year before and the post-it notes he used to leave at her desk, in his uncharacteristically sweet moments. She knows that he'll find it during spring-cleaning, or Morgan will snoop through it and leave it on his desk. It's like a message in a bottle; only she has no idea what the message is.

"Hey," he says casually, like he hasn't been giving her the silent treatment for weeks.

"Hey," she says back, not quite ready to turn around and face him.

A split second before it happens she realizes what's going to happen, because it's his last-ditch move, maybe his only move. Then his hand is on her waist, spinning her around, and his mouth is on hers, insistent and warm and so, so painfully familiar.

Pushing the boxes aside, ignoring her noises of indignation, he hoists her onto the desk. Danny leans his hips into her thighs, sending her skirt riding up around her knees. His hands are everywhere, all at once.

He leaves a warm trail of kisses down her neck to her breastbone, looking up at her as he unties her blouse.

At this angle, his features don't make any sense, like one of the Picassos she never understood the point of. Absurdly wide lips and a strong jaw, too-thick eyebrows, huge dark eyes.

She wraps her legs around him tighter and he groans, one hand working on his buckle. Danny hops backwards, trying to kick his pants off, while she slides her skirt the rest of the way up and yanks her underwear down.

His jeans are still twisted around his ankles, but he's planted himself back between her legs. She'd ask about a condom, but that ship sailed a long, long time ago. He pulls her in for another long kiss as he thrusts inside her.

Their rhythm is awkward at first, too slow, then too fast, her back smacking uncomfortably against the desk, but then, their muscle memory kicks in and it's exactly like it was. The one thing they were never really bad at.

Her face is becoming uncomfortably warm, as his movements push them both closer to the hot pipe, but it only barely registers.

Things are happening so fast, and Mindy wants to take this in, to remember, but he's too focused, his mouth pursed into a thin line, angry creases between his eyes, like he's in surgery, like she's a thing he needs to fix.

The end is a sweaty blur, but she finishes a few seconds before him, gasping into his slick chest. He pushes his hips again, jerky and erratic, before he gives one last thrust, his head buried in her neck, so she can feel each heaving, unsteady breath.

He pulls away slowly, not making eye contact, although it seems stupid to suddenly get shy when his dick is still inside of her.

She pulls up her skirt, trying to smooth out the wrinkles and frowning at the stains on her painstakingly selected outfit. There's a dingy towel on the ground – the origin of which she refuses to contemplate – that she uses to wipe off her legs. And her underwear is nowhere to be found.

She wanted to leave her last day California-cool and casual, not bare-assed and sticky with her ex-boyfriend's semen, but maybe this is more fitting. Good New York. Goodbye Mindy Lahiri, hot mess. Onwards and upwards and whatever.

"Did you take my underwear," she asks and she is proud that she restrains from calling him a pervert.

"What? No!" he says.

He somehow manages to look exactly the same as he did when he walked in, maybe just a little sweatier. He stares at her and she stares back, and she can already feel a lump in her throat and the last thing she needs is make-up running down her face.

"Min…" he says, in a thick voice.

"Don't, Danny. Please. We loved and lost, I know, okay? Believe me, I know."

His eyes darken and his jaw clenches, but he nods. He looks like he's headed toward the door before he turns back to her.

"You know, I predicted this," he says.

"You predicted _this?"_ she asks, gesturing at the boxes still strewn around the room.

"No us, _this_, you leaving."

"Great, Danny. You were right. We were a disaster," she says. "Congratulations."

"I wanted to be wrong," he says softly, staring at something just to her left.

"Well, that's a first," she says.

"I'm sorry," he offers, his voice cracking, although she's not sure if he means the sex or everything that came before it.

"It is what it is," she says, echoing the words she's heard him say a thousand times.

Only now does she understand what a coward's motto that is. Things are almost never just what they are. Things take work.

* * *

><p>The move doesn't fix her broken heart, but time eventually does. And California does give her a sick tan.<p>

The California version of herself also wears more black than she used to, out of some sort of misplaced New Yorker-solidarity. She talks about bagels more too. It's like how Jeff claims his southern accent got thicker when he moved west. On their third date, he told her, _it's important to me, I guess, for people to know that this isn't my only home. _

Mindy nodded, not quite knowing what it meant, just that it resonated inside her, that it mattered that he was a person who could start over.

She went home with him for the first time that night.

* * *

><p>Peter calls her to tell her he's met a girl, and he says <em>a <em>girl, but he means _the _girl, and Mindy is weirdly proud. They've both come a long way.

"How's the practice?" she asks, once he's finished waxing poetic about her legs and her ass and her sick apartment.

"Ah, same old, same old. I'm pretty sure Morgan is secretly running a dog hospital out of your old office."

"You should call him," Peter adds.

"Morgan? Because I'm actually trying to wean him down to one uncomfortable phone call a week."

"Mindy," he says, impatiently.

"I don't think he would pick up the phone," she says truthfully. She never asks after him. She's not sure which would be worse; knowing that he was happy or knowing that he wasn't.

"You were friends for a long time," he says.

"Yeah, and then we were really _not_."

"Can I ask you something?"

"I don't know, is it something gross?"

"No – just what went down between you guys? I feel like you and me, we're kind of similar, and I don't know, maybe you can teach me what not to do."

"Well, I don't know if I would say we're _similar_, but, okay. I honestly, don't know," she admits, leaning back. "I think we were both so scared that the other person was going walk away that we couldn't see straight. It was like, you know when you're riding a bike and you suddenly just _know_ that you're going to fall, so you do, but maybe if you hadn't thought that, you would've been just fine, but once it was in your head, it was too late."

"Nope. I literally have no idea what you're talking about," Pete says.

"Okay that's enough, you can just figure things out on your own. Or not," she adds. "Tell me about New York. What's the last thing you ate?"

He cackles his strange wheezing laugh. "Uh, well I tried to eat a hot dog and it froze before I could get to the office. We're talking completely iced over. I was basically eating a meat-sicle. Will you describe the sun to me? It's been so long since I saw it."

She laughs and spins her chair to one side and then the other.

* * *

><p>That year, the Annual Obstetrics and Gynecology Conference is in San Diego and Jeff almost comes, always a sucker for a nice hotel room and a free breakfast buffet, but they hate leaving Claire with the nanny overnight, so in the end he stays home.<p>

More out of habit, than any real concern, she leafs through the program's attendance lists, keeping an eye out for _Shulman & Associates_. But this time there it is, next to _Jeremy Reed_ and _Daniel Castellano_.

But, she is an adult. A real adult with grown-up responsibilities who eats cereal out of bowls and drinks coffee out of mugs and wine out of wineglasses. She does not flee back to LA. She texts Jeremy and tries to hope that his number has not changed.

She is relieved with a sharpness that stings that Jeff did not come, and she doesn't know if it's for his sake or Danny's.

Mindy makes a conscious effort not to think too hard about her outfit for the opening cocktail reception, but she can't help but appraise herself critically in the mirror. Her face is a shade darker than it used to be, and the skin around her eyes is softer, more creased.

She exhales as she fidgets with her ring, twisting it back and forth along the groove in her finger.

She's wise and hot, like a love child of Beyonce and Hillary Clinton, and she can do this. She will handle this evening with a dignity that astounds everybody. He's not the only man who ever broke her heart. And she's still not completely sure who broke what.

First things first, though, she desperately wants a drink, something tart that won't go straight to her head.

But her Danny-radar is too finely honed; when she walks into the ballroom, he is the first thing she sees, leaning against the bar, surveying the crowd. Their eyes meet and he waves.

She plasters a cheerful smile on her face and heads his way. She goes for a kiss on the cheek, while he reaches for a hug, which somehow turns into her crushed stiffly against his shoulder, her mouth leaving a damp crescent on his button-down. She breathes in his familiar smell and it's like stepping directly into the past.

His part has receded further, the hints of grey turned to streaks, in a way that suits him, and his face is more furrowed, less boyish than before, but the essentials are the same.

She clasps her hands on the bar. This is fine. This is easy. They both know the script of how this should go. And her manners are better than they used to be.

"Sangria?" he asks, signaling at the bartender. She nods. It's not what she wants, but she takes it anyway, because there is a kindness in the fact that he remembers and that he admits to remembering.

"How are you?" she asks. "You look good," she adds and immediately regrets it, but he doesn't seem to notice.

"I'm good, great. It should be an interesting conference," he says, nodding seriously, as if he's a politician discussing foreign affairs with Diane Sawyer.

He throws her a curveball when he doesn't immediately ask her the same question back. _Stick to the script, Danny_, she grumbles to herself, unsure what news of herself to offer to him. He must know the basics. After all, Peter and Morgan came to the wedding and she still sends the entire office a Christmas card each year.

"Where's Jeremy?" she asks instead, peering around him.

"He's flirting with some twenty-two year old waiter, but he'll come find us - I know he wanted to see you."

The way he says _us_ sends a thrill of alarm through every nerve; it's too familiar, too present.

"I guess Jeremy is actually skewing younger now, gross," she says.

"So, you're not going to tell me you're a twenty-something anymore?" he asks, a shine of amusement in his eyes. He's drinking beer but she's almost certain she can smell bourbon on his breath.

"Please, Danny, we both know I'm in my early thirties. Anyway, I'm like a leather jacket, I get better with age."

It's not even close to her best joke, but it seems to put him more at ease. Or maybe the years of separation from her unique comic wit have lowered his standards.

"So, why didn't Peter come?" she asks in the pursuit of topics that will make Danny less monosyllabic.

"It's his son's first birthday," he explains, his eyebrows raised in a can-you-believe-it gesture.

"That's still so terrifying," she says, thinking of the all caps profanity-filled email that Peter wrote when she sent him Claire's birth announcement. "Was he born with horns? Do they do milk keg stands? Tell me everything."

"He's uh, good, I think. No horns. Normal number of fingers."

She blinks at him. Apparently the time apart has also ruined his already questionable gossip abilities.

"You would literally never know that you were a doctor specializing in the birth of what is that, oh yes _babies."_

He shrugs, rolling the mostly empty beer bottle in his hands. He's picked most of the label off.

He looks up, briefly making eye contact before returning to a careful study of the bar's surface. "I don't know how you live here. No subway, no seasons, no good pizza. How do _you_ of all people live without pizza?"

"There's a place near me that makes a great gluten-free, dairy-free pizza made of chia seeds," she says just to see the horror on his face. And he looks so much angrier than she imagined that she can't help it, she laughs.

In response, he smiles a lazy cat smile that completely unzips her. She swallows as heat spreads from her face down through her stomach.

There's a long gap before she opens her mouth, prepping some excuse – _I __have to mingle, oh look there's somebody I know, oh god I just remembered I'm actually dying _– but his fingers close around her wrist.

"I never got used to it, you know," he says quietly. "There's a moment in the day, where I wonder why you're running late. I'm always waiting for you to walk through my door."

Danny glances down, as if he's just realizing that he's holding onto her. He releases her arm, but his hand stays close by, the tips of his fingers overlapping her cocktail napkin.

"Stay for another drink," he says, immediately catching the eye of the bartender and pointing at their empty drinks. She visibly hesitates.

"C'mon, stay. Stay," he repeats in a cajoling tone, flashing her another smile.

"Okay," she says, "one more drink."


End file.
